All I saw - Sarah Palins Wasilla“I think we need a little bit of reality from Wasilla Main Street there, brought to Washington, D.C.” That was the words of the Republican Party’s vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin at a rally in St. Louis ahead of the presidential election in 2008. And it was these words that for a moment brought the gaze of the world upon the small Alaskan commuter town.

At first glance Wasilla with its population of 7028 people probably isn’t worth much attention. And if it hadn’t been for Sarah Palin it’s not very likely that the town would have drawn any attention outside of Alaska at all. But Sarah Palin did not only wish to place Wasilla on the map. She used Wasilla as a metaphor for the values of all the small towns in the United States. She probably wasn’t the first person to celebrate these small town values, seeing them as a way of “saving” the United States from the political elite in Washington D.C. But she was definitely the most visible.

This is what brought me to Wasilla. To experience at first hand the values of “small town America”. To figure out what a town like Wasilla represented, and why Sarah Palin and countless of Tea Party voices that followed spoke and still speak of these town values as the way of saving the United States.